What Should the Church Be Doing?
Obligated to Everything, All The Time: Idealization and Church Identity
This is the third in an ongoing series on the nature of moral obligation. The first step is to name the entangled nature of obligation, and then to ask what this means for those we don’t want to be obligated to. We now turn to the question of the range of obligations which present the Christian community.
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To speak of what Christians are obligated to is to begin with the grounds of all obligation: God. But insofar as God is the One in whom all things move and have their being, we don’t get very far by saying that Christians should be obligated solely to God: to be obligated to God is to be bound up to that which God loves. And so, we are quickly back to the endless ranging world, finding ourselves—in seeking to escape the world and to be obligated only to God—obligated once again to more than we planned on.
This body which is obligated to God, and through God, to the world, is what we call the church. And the church is, by definition, a body of sinners, who have failed and will fail again. It will fail in its obligation toward those which God loves, even while it is loved by God.
Let me pause here before moving forward.
The church is, as constituted by the Holy Spirit as a body of persons on the way toward their redemption, a giant sack of sinners. That we identify the church too directly with the perfected and glorified Christ is to set everyone up for disappointment. As the church, we live as a body connected to Christ, working out our salvation in fear and trembling, awaiting the redemption of our bodies. And accordingly, this presents a problem when it comes to talking about the world that the church finds itself obligated toward, in at least three ways.
First, insofar as the church is a body of sinners being made holy, they are people who imperfectly meet their obligations toward one another: this is less, in this aspect, a feature of the limits of time and space and more a theological problem. When my neighbor approaches me for a loaf of bread, I may not offer him a stone, but it’s not to say that I offer the bread immediately, in the measure asked for, or as the best that I have to offer.
Second, because the church does not meet its obligations to one another, its ability to meet external obligations—whether legitimate or perceived—are accordingly limited. The fractured body in Corinth, incapable of meeting its neighbors needs externally, is the picture of this problem, for though by 2 Corinthians it is more unified than it was initially, it still must be coaxed into providing for Jerusalem in famine (2 Cor. 9).
Third, in its imperfect state of grace, the church is perenially tempted to misname the scope of its action, assuming that certain claims made by its neighbors are obligations to be tended to in the shape asked for. Christians are called to feed the hungry, but some foods fill the belly but deteriorate the arteries. Likewise, many cries for justice are to be answered at face value, but if Christians hold that sin distorts our view of our own need, then the need for justice is not the same as the form it is requested at all times: daily bread is always given by God, but sometimes not in the form we had desired.
The Multiplying Obligations of The Church
It’s hard to overstate the ways in which churches, in terms of what we expect of them, have been inundated with the expectation toward change in the last two decades. American churches in particular are caught up into a social fabric which not only welcomed them but supported them culturally, the presumption for decades has been that if churches will be here, they’ll be of some social benefit. Now, some of this is, I think, theologically justified: insofar as churches are enjoined to be neighbors, you have to listen to your neighbors and care for your neighbors, even if your neighbors aren’t great or supportive or return that love.
But in terms of the obligations which both the church’s neighbors and the church’s members place upon them, it’s quite staggering. My recent book tried very hard to not to conceive of its task in terms of more to do, more work to undertake, in part because much of the discourse around church takes this frame of tasks to do, or at least, tasks to do ordered toward shaping the church toward being a body of great social benefit.
The church is asked to be trauma-informed, active in its concern about racial injustice, aware of its ecological relationships, more attentive to its evangelism in an era of declining numbers. These, in and of themselves, are not bad: to ask that members of a church be aware of the burdens that others carry, for example, is part of what is entailed in being a mature church, Paul says. Attending to the inequities which are caused by ethnic bias or historic wrongs of racist policy is, likewise, one of the main undercurrents Paul has to address in nearly every letter.1
But many of these injunctions are predicated upon the assumption that, because these are good things, that they rise to the level of obligation, that the church must embody these goods or fail to live up to its calling of being Christ’s body. There are many things to say here, but the one I want to focus on is what it means that we cast these moral aspirations as obligations, binding injunctions. In his examination of the Christian life, John Calvin described the meaning of the Good Samaritan as multiplying out in joy and, well, endless obligation:
But here, as I have said, the chief design is to show that the neighborhood, which lays us under obligation to mutual offices of kindness, is not confined to friends or relatives, but extends to the whole human race.2
This notion of endless obligation to our neighbors is an extension of Calvin’s notion that our lives, because we contribute nothing to our salvation, are endlessly and expanding forms of praise and gratitude: endless obligation matching endless gratitude. You can see where this goes: if our lives are endless forms of gratitude, then our obligations toward our neighbor are likewise endless—not because we are meriting our salvation, but because our gratitude for God is without limit.
The Multiplied Occupations of the Church
This orientation toward gratitude turns into manifold obligation, precisely as the praise of the subject becomes less rooted in the gratuity of its very being: the less certain the church is of its status as the body of Christ—the frail, halting, and sustained body—the more the church must ground its being in its service to the world, to secure its place in the social landscape.
Lest I be misunderstood here: the church as the church is the church toward the world, insofar as we only ever approach God through the world; there is no severing of the link between our worship of God and the approach we make to God through our praise, love of neighbor, and gratitude-as-gifts-to-the-world. But this is different than equating the securing of the church-as-church with its actualization of holiness in all the ways asked of it.
To be sure, many of the purifications asked of the church—the enjoined obligations made upon it—have roots that churches would do well to graft into their trees. The church may, and should, repent of the ways in which it has taken up idols, enslaved its neighbors, loved Mammon. But it will never do it maximally or perfectly, and if this is a precursor to the worship of God, it will never begin to meet its vocation of gratitude.
So far, so good: the church is an imperfect entity, and the sooner we realize this the better. But churches sorting out their obligations to their neighbors does not happen in a vacuum. Tied into this is the way that the church is perceived as imperfectly living into its vocation, when its worship and practice comes under scrutiny according to rubrics which are constantly accelerating and shifting. What constituted excellence and piety five years ago must keep up with the news cycle, and the news cycles, beloved, are rarely the speed of real life: they are the speed of the simulation of life.
As Hartmut Rosa has put it, the key mark of our age is acceleration: that development of thought, research, and social goods is happening less in a way which emphasizes innovation, and more in a way which emphasizes fast refinement. It’s the traditional three year seminary collapsed into a single year; it’s masonry by hand replaced by machines that pour your concrete home in a day. And in this case, it is the cycle of accelerated norms about how best to minister to neighbors, according to newly developed norms which will themselves be eclipsed within three years.
The obligation to love our neighbor, thus, can never be realized, not only because the church is a body of sinners, but because the goalpost for what counts as good ministry keeps changing, and changing according to accelerating norms no church can keep up with.
Obligations are, in fact, endless, but the obligations developed according to barely-tested lines of evaluation are dead ends, churn and burn modes of aggiornomento which lead only to the immolation of a church in service to being fresh. There is an immolation proper to a church, that it offers itself as a living sacrifice to God, but in God, our obligations are those which are met over time, though always in the mode of smaller things in great love, resolving sufferings by bearing them in Christ. To advocate for its neighbor’s right to daily bread, yes, but for its neighbors right to all forms of spiritual and material nutrition—these are obligations which must be more tested, over time. The church enters into these obligations askance, for the kingdom of God is one which smolders instead of burning the house down all at once.
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Reading: more work on what it means for a church to be apostolic. Lots of old conciliar statements, reflections on ecumenical convergences of church authority, and the role of television in proliferating religious authority. This project has led me to some weird places. Saskia Sassen’s A Sociology of Globalization rose back up to the top of the pile. The Haunting of Hill House growls on. And soon, very soon, finally reading Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices.
Writing: I have an essay out in the latest issue of Mere Orthodoxy, print edition, on the inanity of expecting that our relationships should be mediated by companies and other for-profit entities. It’ll be online soonish, and I’ll link it here at that point, but you should consider subscribing.
For Paid Subscribers: On an evening in September (still in determination), we’re going to discuss Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality.
“Jew” and “Gentile” in Paul’s world aren’t religious markers solely, but ethnic and cultural markers. Stereotypes, centuries of bloody conflict, and legal policies of exclusion are all part of what the early churches are up against when they are reminded that Christ came to break down barrier walls to make one body (Ephesians), or that there should be a ruthless rooting out of ethnic priority of who gets to be members of the church (Romans).
https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom33/calcom33.